Results tagged “Sprawl is dead” from Green Flow

(photo copyright Los Angeles Times)

Evidence that speculative auto-dependant sprawl was one of the major factors behind the Great Recession is emerging through real estate market studies of major US metro areas, from Washington DC to Southern California.

Note the New York Times on November 6 (p.A13):

New research about the recession has also bolstered one of transit's central premises -- that highway-driven sprawl is bad for a city's economic health. Recent studies at the University of Utah, for example, concluded that foreclosure rates in the Washington area were much lower in counties served by the Metro rail system, compared with the next ring of counties farther out, and that home prices in Phoenix had also fallen in direct proportion to the distance from downtown. 

A new report I wrote for the Post Carbon Institute (link to pdf) includes the case of Victorville, California, a virtually 100 percent auto-dependent city of 107,000 that grew from 64,000 in 2000. Real estate prices started to crash in this Mojave desert community in 2006 when gas hit $2 a gallon. Victorville is now one of the foreclosure capitals of the nation, as home prices fell from an average of well over $325,000 in 2007 to under $125,000 in 2009.


Source: City-data.com (11/09)

The market was so decimated that large new homes, some might call them McMansions, were demolished in Victorville (see photo at beginning of post) earlier this year to free the city from liability resulting from possible vandalism, crime and fire danger.

As gas prices hit $3 and $4 a gallon, people couldn't afford the thousands of dollars of extra gas expenses that were required to commute to the Los Angeles area, which is almost 100 miles away. As a result, home prices crashed, foreclosures proliferated, developers went bankrupt, and the city and the region are now suffering. At the same time, San Bernardino County was successfully sued by the California Attorney General's office for allowing development in its communities, such as Victorville, with disregard for global climate change and regional air pollution.

Similar imploding exurban real estate prices started the 2007-2009 national foreclosure crisis, with these toxic assets setting off the derivatives financial meltdown and, you know the rest...

Victorville is by no means an isolated example. The amount of suburban and exurban development that occurred in the 1990s and early 2000s when fuel prices hit their historic low prices (see graph below) has created a massive expanse of excess houses and infrastructure requiring untold resources to build and maintain.

 

Largely because of such sprawl, stimulated by inexpensive gas prices and a lack of local government controls, California's main source of greenhouse gases come from the transportation sector.

Clearly it's time for the focus on "green cities" to expand outward to greening the suburbs and the exurbs, because that's where the majority of our nation's population resides. Though 80 percent of the nation lives in urban (developed) areas, only 20 percent of those "urbanites" live in big cities. About 60 percent of US population lives in metro area 'burbs of under 100,000. 
 
During the last three years, outer-suburban or exurban areas lost far more value than real estate in urban or suburban areas served by public transit with walkable, bikeable and mixed-use zoning options as my report and others, such as Prof. Arthur C. Nelson's at the University of Utah, are demonstrating.

This is the first time in US history that sprawled low-density suburbs or exurbs have fallen faster in average value than city or inner-suburban areas; suddenly "Smart Growth" is more than a niche market or trend--it will be at the core of financially successful planning and development.

Greater density with non-auto mobility options is going to dominate development as long as we have climate change, volatile resource availability (particularly water) and high gas prices. In addition to economics, there are demographics. The nation's dramatically aging population consists of more single people, retired couples and empty-nesters who want apartments or condos from which they can walk, bike and ride buses or use subways and light rail. 

The redesign of suburbs and exurbs will require some painful Victorville-type actions that may waste resources, such as tearing down certain neighborhoods or homes. There are other options, however. Ellen Dunham-Jones and June Williamson demonstrate design examples in their excellent 2009 book, Retrofitting Suburbia.

Not all future metro areas need to follow the hub-and-spoke format with central cities and their suburbs. Metro areas might consider, for instance, designing growth and transit corridors around multiple regional centers of economic activity, which was the aim of the Los Angeles area's Compass Blueprint.

California's anti-sprawl Senate Bill 375 is the nation's first such statewide measure. It now is being guided by an official strategic growth process, which is being led by a council with modeling tools for preferred scenarios developed by Calthorpe Associates, transit-oriented development champion Peter Calthorpe's Berkeley, CA firm.   

On a more granular level, cul-de-sacs, which are impediments to non-automotive mobility, can be re-engineered to accommodate more direct walking and biking access.

Some innovative buyers are devising ways to use the glut of unoccupied or unsold large homes for business or residential purposes other than single-family living. Based on major shifts in market demand, home builders are downsizing and are constructing more energy-efficiently.

The days of plowing productive agricultural areas under for suburban home tracts and strip malls may be coming to an end. A Denver suburban home developer is incorporating working agricultural land into unsold tract home land plots in numerous communities, in what is being billed as "Agriburbia."

Clearly, energy efficiency, greenhouse gas emission reduction and resource conservation are becoming guiding factors for much more than regulatory and environmental compliance, they are beginning to dictate the very economies upon which our metro regions operate.

We must now rethink how to develop our communities so that sprawl does not re-emerge, and relegate it to history, as an oddity from the era when gas was cheap, the climate was forgiving and resources were seemingly endless. 

Warren Karlenzig is president of Common Current, a consultancy based in San Anselmo, California with international projects on urban sustainability strategy and metrics. He is a Fellow at the Post-Carbon Institute and author of How Green is Your City?: The SustainLane US City Rankings. 

 

 

Los Angeles Times photo

Sprawl is dead: That's the takeaway of a new report analyzing how toxic exurban real estate started the US economy on its downward spiral. Metro regions and developers are picking up the pieces and are vowing, "never again."

The unchecked trend of US exurbanization was one of the major factors setting off the beginning of the global financial crisis of 2008-2009, according to a new research paper published by the Post Carbon Institute investigating the relationship of sprawled, completely car-dependent communities to real estate risk as well as to climate change and ecosystems.

Besides the inherent threats to climate change and dwindling resources, exurban development during the past decades put the United States in a vulnerable economic position when steadily rising gas prices in 2004-2005 began their march toward $4-5 a gallon in mid 2008. 

The research paper argues that many suburbs and most exurbs, which constitute the vast majority of urbanized areas in the United States, have been building up an infrastructure of complete auto dependence, which threatens the climate through multiple forms of inefficient energy, food and resource use.

Despite the emerging "green" urbanism trend, which can be found in a number of North American cities, unplanned exurban growth must be addressed and managed more efficiently, or the economy will face further severe national real estate shocks as oil prices rise again.

California's Senate Bill 375 is the first statewide anti-sprawl measure, and similar regulation and related regional planning processes will need to occur on a national basis to systemically reduce the combined risks of exurban development and financial speculation. 

The following is an excerpt from my complete paper, a publication pre-release of the "Roadmap for the Transition" series.

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In April 2009--just when people thought things couldn't get worse in San Bernardino County, California--bulldozers demolished four perfectly good new houses and a dozen others still under construction in Victorville, 100 miles northeast of downtown Los Angeles.

The structures' granite countertops and Jacuzzis were removed first. Then the walls came down and the remains were unceremoniously scrapped. A woman named Candy Sweet came by the site looking for wood and bartered a six-pack of cold Coronas for some of the splintered two-by-fours. For a boomtown in one of the fastest-growing counties in the United States, things were suddenly looking pretty bleak...

The recent decline of Victorville and other "boomburbs" may well prove to be the last gasp of the United States' decades-long suburban/exurban development frenzy. We will be absorbing or trying to erase the unwanted surplus of this end-of-the-twentieth-century building spree for years, if not decades. In the meantime, exurban communities in general--and Victorville in particular--will face a daunting set of short term and long term challenges as the 21^st century shapes up to be very different than the world they were built for...

Within the United States, existing metropolitan areas can be retrofitted to take advantage of breakthroughs in sustainability and efficiency technologies, as well as new financial incentives.

The American Recovery and Re-investment Act of 2009 has provided some funding for the energy-efficient redesign of our buildings and our means of transportation. But much more ambitious projects need to be undertaken to retrofit our communities not only for energy efficiency, but to build their overall resilience.

Fortunately, a foundation for this work already exists. Barely ten years ago, "green buildings," downtown streetcars, urban farms, car-sharing companies, high-quality bicycle infrastructure and other physical features now associated with urban sustainability were found only in a handful of North American cities. Today, they are popping up everywhere.

Big cities like New York, Los Angeles and Chicago are actively trying to "out-green" each other, while smaller cities like Boulder, Colorado, and Alexandria, Virginia are rolling out their own localized sustainability solutions.

Some communities have taken early steps toward protecting their surrounding agricultural lands, or "foodsheds," from well-established regional plans and policies in Portland, Oregon to San Francisco's 2009 comprehensive local food policy. Cities are starting to realize that they can't just "grow smarter"--they have to fundamentally remake themselves to be resilient for the unprecedented economic, social, and environmental challenges of the 21st century.

Some metro areas rethinking themselves for resilience have simultaneously become home to "clean tech" centers with significantly high job growth rates. Clean tech clusters are emerging in the San Francisco Bay Area, Boston, and Austin, as well as in some less-expected locations; in Toledo, Ohio, for instance, more than 4% of all jobs are now in research, development and manufacturing for solar energy. Other key areas of future job growth are in green building and landscaping, water conservation technologies, low-carbon materials design and advanced transportation...

If the "Great Recession" of 2008-2009 taught us anything, it was that allowing the unrestrained sprawl of energy-inefficient communities and infrastructure is not a sustainable economic development strategy; rather, it is a recipe for continued disaster on every level.

Twentieth century-style sprawl has destroyed valuable farmland, sensitive wildlife habitat, and irreplaceable natural water supply systems at great environmental, economic, and social cost. We can no longer manage and develop our communities with no regard for the natural resources and ecological systems that provide our most basic needs.

What lessons emerge from metropolitan areas that have begun to plan for the future by building their resilience with economic, energy, and environmental uncertainty in mind?

• Build and re-build denser and smarter. Suburban and urban population densities need to increase so that energy-efficient transportation choices like public transit, bicycling and walking can flourish. Multi-modal mobility cannot succeed at the densities found in most American suburban and urban communities today. Increasing density doesn't have to mean building massive high-rises: adding just a few more stories on existing or new mixed-use buildings can double population density--and well-designed, increased density can also improve community quality of life and economic vitality. Resource-efficient building technologies, as certified by the US Green Building Council's Leadership in Environment and Energy (LEED) or the US EPA's Energy Star rating, can be retrofitted for existing building stock and mandated for all new construction.
• Focus on food. Gardens (whether in backyards, community parks, or in and on top of buildings) may supplement people's diets with fresh local produce--but urban areas need to think big and plan systemically for significantly increased food production. In many Asian cities and towns--even big cities like Seoul, South Korea, the size of New York--there are thriving small farms interspersed within metro areas. Growing and processing more food for local consumption bolsters regional food security and provides jobs while reducing the energy, packaging and storage needed to transport food to metro regions.
• Focus on water. Our freshwater supply is one of our the most vulnerable resources in the United States. Water vulnerability is no longer just a problem for Southwestern desert cities--communities in places like Texas, Georgia and even New Jersey have recently had to contend with water shortages. As precipitation patterns become less reliable and underground aquifers and mountain snowpack dry up, more and more communities will need to significantly reduce water demand through conservation, restrictions and "tiered pricing."
• Think in terms of systems. If we think of our urban areas as living, breathing entities--each with a set of basic and more specialized requirements--we can better understand how to transform our communities from random configurations into dynamic, high-performance systems of resilience. The "metabolism" of urban systems depends largely on how energy, water, food, materials, labor and knowledge are used (and reused, where possible), or metabolized. From these ingredients and processes come products, services, and--if the system is efficient--minimal waste and pollution...

Warren Karlenzig is president of Common Current, a consultancy based in San Anselmo, California with international projects on urban strategy and metrics. He is a Fellow at the Post-Carbon Institute and author of How Green is Your City?: The SustainLane US City Rankings.